I wasn’t planning to get the game because of the 3 player thing but I already knew that… why are people buying it then getting mad about it? Is the steam store page just not clear enough about it? In which case, fair.
I don’t think it’s obtuse or anything, this stuff isn’t hard to find out before buying. I think it’s probably closer to people being afraid of fromsoft doing something different, but don’t have words to articulate it, so they express it in other ways.
I wouldn’t hold it against them. You and I are in a place where we know the value in looking this stuff up, and we know the industry. There are a lot more people out there who don’t, and others who still haven’t made the mistake they need to in order to learn it.
Oh for sure, I don’t think less of people for these kind of situations. More at the state where it’s unfortunate but also interesting. We keep seeing these situations happen with varying amounts of justification from people, it’s interesting to try to understand what’s happening.
The store page is kinda confusing. I don't think the line "Join forces with other players to take on the creeping night and the dangers within featuring 3-player co-op." along with both singleplayer and co-op listed as valid playing styles is something most reasonable people would interpret the way that it really is: be exactly 3 players with external voice chat available because all other ways of playing the game will suck hard.
They've been sorta honest about that in interviews and such but those don't have the same reach as their huge marketing campaign.
I don’t see the game getting either of those things.
Duos, you can already do, you just have to take on a rando as a third. They could scale the difficulty down for 2 players, sure, but Elden Ring’s mutiplayer scaling is notoriously terrible, in part because no amount of scaling can account for the lost potential for splitting aggro, in a game where splitting aggro is king.
Voice chat is something that FromSoft has INTENTIONALLY never included in any prior game, despite there being co-op in all of them. Making players coordinate with each other with very limited communication tools is one of FromSoft’s signature design choices. The fast pace of this game compared to prior games makes the lack of communication tools hurt a lot more, for sure, but it’s still very much playable. Anyone who dislikes this design choice is absolutely free to, but it’s not gonna change.
Yuri’s original post has since been deleted. Erin Fitzgerald, the (second) voice of Chie, also said on Bluesky that she won’t be returning, along with Amanda Winn Lee, the voice of Yukiko, elsewhere:
I don’t know if Sega or Atlus did something to piss everyone off, if it’s some bizarre marketing stunt, or if the others just decided to pile on after Yuri went scorched earth on this. The whole thing’s pretty weird.
I was one of the ones to test this game back in March I think, I thought it was a lot of fun. And at that point there were only three classes and one final boss. I only played with randoms, as none of my friends got the invite. I’ll be picking this game up at some point for sure, maybe when it first goes on sale.
Wow, I guess I assumed that I misunderstood something before launch because it was hard to believe they would make a multiplayer game that needed 3 people but wouldnt work with two but here we are. What a move.
you can queue with a single friend, you’ll just get another random player. which is not ideal, but probably not back breaking either, unless there is some stupid way to grief other players.
some of the steam reviews made me think that i literally can’t queue with a friend unless we are three people.
After playing last night, it’s not back breaking to queue up but it’s full body cast inducing getting a “bad” third player because there’s no forfeit method and you can’t even intentionally spike the run until the first boss.
I really wish gamers could unite in a way that they buy out sufficient ownership stakes in these terrible publishers that they force them to treat development studios better, and not push out half-finished slop filled to the brim with predatory monetisation.
EA, Konami, Ubisoft would all be ripe for a renaissance if that were to pass.
Konami is an entirely different beast. The Japanese industry is so ingrained in a different ethos altogether, I just don’t see any public-backed push for change working the way it would with a Western publisher.
Just look at the direction Nintendo is heading. Do we have any actual chance of stopping that train?
Its capitalism. Individuals will not change this. Systemic problems need systemic solutions. First step is outlawing centralization of capital and putting back legislation against large corporations. But good luck doing that in the US.
I’ve been hearing it for years, the same as outright boycotts. It’s not that people don’t care, it’s that not enough people care for it to make a difference. For every person pissed about getting burned on a $60+ purchase for a dogshit game, there are 99 more who’ll eat it and move on without caring all that much. You’ve got to improve the content at home, where it counts without worrying about the drek getting turned out by large companies/studios. Invest in indie, or shop around is the best bet IMO.
I’m sure we all (at least those old enough) to remember that Boycott Modern Warfare II Steam group screenshot.
Idealistically, imagine that for every release - instead of giving EA that $80 dollars, 10% of gamers put that money towards a share instead.
So that would work out to be ~$200m in lost upfront sales, and up to $540m in lost recurring spend (microtransactions, battle passes etc.).
That would only be enough for gamers to own 0.5% of the company after the first year, but keeping this up for multiple years could have a downward pressure on EA’s stock price long-term as they miss their financial forecasts - increasing gamer’s buying power on shares.
Within a few years, these “Gamers United” would begin to have sufficient stake to influence board decisions (for the better).
The best part being that, the entire time, EA would continue to pay dividends to them (currently at a rate of ~$3.10 per share, per year), while they still technically own that money - almost like a corporate savings account.
*Edit: out of the three companies I randomly picked, Ubisoft would actually be the softest target - as their market cap is only $1.38b, so gamers would only need to acquire ~$700m of shares to wrestle control of the company!
I don’t want the current iteration of EA to succeed; but I do want them to return to form and help* nurture quality releases of Command and Conquer, Mass Effect, Dead Space, Burn Out, Need for Speed, Road Rash, Theme X, Sim City and about a dozen other dormant (or mismanaged) franchises.
Could I get similar experiences from other publishers and developers? Absolutely — but I’d much rather we as gamers have a broader choice in the future of our hobby, rather than continually whittling down our options as quality developers get swallowed up and spat out by the current industrial machine.
The cast is playing high schoolers, right? If they’re re-recording audio at all, wouldn’t it be better to get people in their 20s, at the most, rather than in their 40s?
On the one hand I hate hearing about people losing their jobs. I dislike people not being able to have an opportunity to support themselves. On the other hand any and all trouble for EA makes me happy. I long for the day they have to sell off their studios and their CEO has to try and not be remembered as the guy that killed the golden goose for investor capitol.
It’s time that investors stop looking at video games as a get rich quick opportunity. And trying to turn it into the new cubicle farm. Sandfall and a lot of other smaller devs are proving that a small team of generalists are able to do better work than these huge and bloated monstrosities that EA and its kind have become.
Also they pretty much show with this and several other cancellations that they cannot fathom a business model that doesn’t rely on predator monetization.
Damn I was looking forward to this, Marc Bernardin was a writer for it, in fact I believe the lead writer. Love his stuff, found him by following Kevin Smith
I’d really rather gamers focused their energy into showing support for the developer groups making cool projects, than specifically deriding any works made under publishers they dislike.
Once every few years, EA and Ubisoft produce something that’s really cool; and much as we’d rather the publishers were replaced with better ones, at the least we can be happy that developers got to put out one or two good games through them.
I’d really rather gamers focused their energy into showing support for the developer groups making cool projects, than specifically deriding any works made under publishers they dislike.
The thing about EA is they have a long history of acquiring the developer groups you’re talking about, then mismanaging them into the ground before dissolving them entirely. I know just as many if not more only exist because of EA and their funding, but it’s hard not to feel bitter when many of my favorite studios no longer exist due to their incompetence and greed.
You underestimate just how much they treat this like a business and take advantage of passionate people. Nobody does game dev for a career without a passion.
It’s the painting and detailing that can be quite expensive and time consuming. You obviously don’t have to paint your minis, but that’s the entire point for a lot of people.
Lots of stuff to bitch about with GW but prices aren’t one of them. Exhibit A is the article you’re responding to, they are responsible with their profits and put them where they should. Exhibit B is they could minimize costs and outsource the entire plastic operation but they still make all models in England. Exhibit C is paying for Art is always morally the correct thing to do, even when mass produced. Finally Exhibit D, fuck GW for promoting incredibly short lifecycles for their games and pushing an almost weekly FOMO event on products that leads a lot more to these profits than just model sales.
In the sense that you’re going to overpay for editions and minis that they’re constantly updating to squeeze more money out of you while having a genuinely good but expensive paint catalogue ruined by paint pots designed to waste paint, yes.
In the sense that it’s pure entertainment and no one and nothing is making you buy them despite all that, no.
Now, if we want to talk about how they’re essentially monetizing fascist rhetoric and the “satire” died decades ago that’s a whole new ballgame.
In 40k, everyone is fascist. The Imperium worships a corpse who is gonna wake up from life support and save humanity any day now guys. Their creed is “suffer not the xenos, mutant, nor heretic to live”.
Their main enemies are Chaos: nightmare demons and cultists worshipping evil gods spawned from the Imperium’s own fascism.
The biggest threats on the horizon are the Tyranids, a ravenous swarm of bugs who want to eat the galaxy, and Necrons, a feudal empire who sold their souls for immortality while destroying the galaxy.
There are also the Drukhari, murder rape pirates who had such a big cocaine orgy they tore a hole in the galaxy, and Orks, fungal football hooligans whose only purpose in life is to get into a good fight.
The only “good guys” are the Eldar of the Craftworlds, who are arrogant communists with a birth rate issue, and the Tau: a Marxist-Leninist Federation of Planets who are secretly all being mind controlled.
The setting is supposed to be a satire of fascist ideology, but at some point Games Workshop started believing the pro-Imperium propaganda they spend all day writing.
Some of that I already knew, but why do you say games workshop is believing their own propaganda? Aren’t they just telling a story and creating a universe? What are they, the company, doing that is fascist?
That’s a lot more effort to explain than I’m willing to do for a Lemmy post but basically they’ve not only confirmed the Big Magic Strong Man does at least try to work in humanity’s favor and was right about most everything, but there’s a lot of “the Imperium might be fucked but it’s the only hope” going on in general.
All of the Imperium’s propaganda is justified, all their little fascist warrior cults are all that stands between life and Chaos, the Inquisitor Puritans are right because the Radicals always go Chaos etc etc etc.
I thought some of that was them trying to wash away the original fascist roots of OG 40K. Haven’t they been trying to slowly retool and rebrand the imperium more as the “good guys” so they can sell more merch?
Original 40k was Rogue Trader, written largely by British anarchists, and the actual motivations of the Heresy Era figures like the Primarchs and Emperor were left vague, so you could figure out for yourself they were genocidal megalomaniacs.
Rebranding the outright fascists as the unironic good guys is exactly why it’s now fascist propaganda.
They used to give out their IP to shitty mobile games for pennies. Then they went after actual creators who made something amazing and gated them behind a subscription service.
ign.com
Aktywne